A tissue-permeable fluorescent probe for Al (III), Cu (II) imaging in vivo

With the increasing of human activities, the issue of environmental pollution is currently more and more serious, such as Al3+ (Cu2+) pollutants which deeply influenced the growth of animal and plant life. Meantime, detecting them in living tissues are largely restricted by biocompatibility of probes. Herein, we use triphenylamine fluorophore and salicylaldehyde moiety to construct a dendrimer-like probe L which has a sensitive and selective detection of Al3+ and Cu2+ in single solvent simultaneously. These critical attributes such as good selectivity, high sensitivity, low cytotoxicity, high photostability that encourage us to further explore the potential in living cells and deep-tissues. The experiments demonstrate that L not only can image the intracellular Al3+ and Cu2+ but visualize them accumulated in zebra fish and Arabidopsis at the organelle level, which indicate L has micrometer-level analysis towards Al3+ and Cu2+. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.